People dive for cover at Route 91 Harvest country music festival in Las Vegas, Nevada. More than 500 people were injured and were 59 killed

David Becker/Getty Images

While the horror in Las Vegas was still unfolding, trolls were busy filling social media feeds with lies. “My dad is missing after Las Vegas shooting. Please RT and share. We are distraught,” one person tweeted. It was sent at 23:23 Las Vegas time, just over an hour after a gunman started firing on thousands of people at a country music festival, killing 59 and injuring more than 500.

But the person pictured in the tweet had nothing to do with the Las Vegas attack. The photo attached was of Johnny Sins, an actor in pornographic films. Before the account that posted it was suspended, the tweet had racked up almost 600 retweets from a mixture of sincere tweeters and those calling it out as a fake.

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“They probably think I wanna make fun of dead people in the attack or I dont know when I tweeted it I didnt even know what happened since I live in Italy,” the Twitter user @bloomoreos, who posted the fake tweet, told me.

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The 17-year-old, said he “nabbed” the tweet from someone else on Twitter and passed it off as his own creation. “All i did was copy and paste a tweet on my timeline while I was in class,” he explained as we exchanged direct messages on Twitter.

Despite publicly boasting about the number of times his tweet had been reported – over 4,000 times before he was suspended – @bloomoreos doesn’t consider himself a troll. “I used to be it but now im not one anymore this is just an account I have for call of duty teams,” he wrote. Before his account was taken offline, he chatted with other people that had spread fake appeals of their own and shared racist memes.

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“[People] should consider the fact that maybe who make these tweets doesnt want to make fun of the dead people but they just want to defuse the situation and have some fun when the world is getting through difficult moments,” @bloomoreos added.

But Whitney Phillips, an academic at Mercer University who has written two books on trolls and their behaviour, says there’s no such thing as joking online. “If we had to deal with the full repercussions of what we said on the internet, we would probably stop talking on the internet,” she says.

Mourners light candles on Las Vegas Boulevard the night after the mass shooting

Getty / Drew Angerer / Staff

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Phillips doesn’t waste much time thinking about why trolls post fake news in the aftermath of tragedies, but says they’re probably in it to provoke a response. “One of the primary reasons they do is that it gets the response that they desire. They’re performing. They’re pushing their information as far as they can. And we’re all left scratching our heads and in this case crying.”

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As a journalist writing about trolls, my complicity in all this is not lost on me. In the wake of terrible attacks, trolls piggyback on the grief of others, and the media reports on them, sometimes mistaking their posts for real people grieving, sometimes to pile derision on them. “This same cycle plays out after every single tragedy,” Phillips says. “It becomes a national story because of mainstream amplification.”

Twitter now lets you mute 'eggs' and will tell you when action is taken against trolls

But people are still left struggling to understand why trolls see tragedies as an opportunity to confuse and hurt people. The trolls I spoke to seemed to find it hard to grasp why people take this so seriously. “It was a joke in poor taste taken out of context,” writes Twitter user @FUCKOFFCAHILL, whose account has also been suspended. He shared a post of the German footballer Mesut Özil with the message “This is my brother, a practicing Muslim who is missing after going to the concert and not coming back in Las Vegas - RT please and pray.”

“I thought it’d be funny, I have a dark sense of humour I suppose,” @FUCKOFFCAHILL told me. Like @bloomoroes his Twitter feed is sprinkled with racist memes. He’s 17 but hints that he might soon put his trolling days behind him. “I mean any older than 18 and it’s pretty sad imo but that part of twitter is generally filled with jokes like mine, most in poor taste.”

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He deleted the fake tweet soon after he posted it. “After some left wing feminist maniac women screenshotted the tweet and showed it to her 200k followers I’ve been getting an endless amount of messages telling me to kill myself, maybe deserved,” he explains.

Both @bloomoreos and @FUCKOFFCAHILL frame their tweets as misguided jokes that stirred up an internet full of people that take themselves too seriously. @bloomoreos’ followers congratulated him on his tweet’s success, saying “you did well boss” and he posted “can’t stop laughing” alongside a link to a BuzzFeed article that called out his tweet as fake.

When I approach him on twitter, @bloomoreos can’t quite work out why I’m interested in his tweet. It was a throwaway joke to him and he seemed impatient that I didn’t understand his particular brand of irony. It’s a way of behaving that’s been carefully honed on some of the grubbiest sections of the internet – 4chan and the more sinister corners of Reddit.

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“4chan really crystalised a certain way of being ironic that makes it really hard to respond to on the internet,” Phillips says. “But I don’t give a shit if these people think they are being ironic because their impact is very real. This is just another example of the destructive nature of these posts.”

After thousands of reports, Twitter suspended @bloomoreos and @FUCKOFFCAHILL. “We are aware of this issue and are proactively taking action on content that violates our terms of service,” a Twitter spokesperson said in a statement that is rolled out all-too-often by Silicon Valley technology firms unable to grasp the problems caused by their services.

Both of these trolls will be back soon enough, with new handles and the same old abusive tweets. “I’ve had six suspended accounts,” @FUCKOFFCAHILL boasts. @bloomoreos is similarly resolute. “Yes, I would come back.”